An idealistic singer in a fledgling Latvian rock band fights censorship and indifference in this inventive musical, which earned comparisons to the French New Wave. With Gyula Gazdag’s The Selection, a Hungarian take on the intersection of socialism and rock ’n’ roll.

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Sunday, May 10
7 PM

Released the year before the building of the Berlin Wall, this farce imagines the relocation of a village from East to West Germany. With Vlastimil Venclík’s Czech short The Uninvited Guest, on a couple confronting—then growing accustomed to—an intruder.

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Friday, May 15
7 PM

Introduction by Stanislav Menzelevskyi

Legendary director Kira Muratova’s demented chronicle of the absurdities and insults of post-glasnost Soviet life takes its title and cues from a psychological condition that alternates between maniacal aggression and apathetic inaction. “A movie that breaks all the rules” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

Past Films

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Digital Restoration

A humble triangle player in a city orchestra unexpectedly winds up its party director and, engorged with a taste of power, soon becomes a tyrant in Slovak director Peter Solan’s droll send-up of authority and hypocrisy.

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Digital RestorationFilm to Table dinner follows

This lighthearted comedy turns a dysfunctional Warsaw into a slapstick playground worthy of Jacques Tati, balancing criticism and lyricism in its portrait of the forgotten details of daily life in a socialist state.

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Digital Restoration

A Baltic Duck Soup about the dispute between two nations over a desert borderland, this ambitious, playful film makes colorful fun of fascists and imperialists, patriotism and dogmatism, in a burst of creative satire made the same year as Dr. Strangelove.

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Digital Restoration

A bumbling protagonist fails at a series of assignments before finally showing defiance in this recently restored Hungarian classic, whose acerbic humor and political critique made it renowned in the Soviet bloc. “As broadly entertaining as it is bold” (New York Times).

The Cinema of the Absurd: Eastern European Film 1960–1989

March 26–May 15, 2020

Absurdity was a fact of life in the socialist republics of Eastern Europe, from the end of World War II until—for most of these countries—the revolutions that began to transform the region in 1989. Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation of the former “people’s republics” from their repressive regimes, this program features works from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the former East Germany, and both parts of the former Czechoslovakia, most in West Coast premieres of digital restorations from their national film institutions. As the series shows, the shared sensibility of the absurd unites these diverse nations and their films.

The Eastern European sense of the absurd brewed over centuries when peoples of the region could not determine their fates. In the twentieth century, the absurd overflowed...

Absurdity was a fact of life in the socialist republics of Eastern Europe, from the end of World War II until—for most of these countries—the revolutions that began to transform the region in 1989. Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation of the former “people’s republics” from their repressive regimes, this program features works from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the former East Germany, and both parts of the former Czechoslovakia, most in West Coast premieres of digital restorations from their national film institutions. As the series shows, the shared sensibility of the absurd unites these diverse nations and their films.

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These films evoke the liberties that Eastern Europeans only intermittently enjoyed in the twentieth century and that again feel fragile in the twenty-first. Glossy or stark, scathing and playful, these movies express the ludicrousness of authoritarian rule through creative varieties of absurdity.